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Remarks of 
Brigadier-General George Ricliards 

U. S. M. C. 

AT THE MEETING OF 

The Sons of the Revolution 

IN THE STATE OF MARYLAND 



MARCH 15, 1918 



"The Royal Welsh Fusiliers" 




Remarks of 
Brigadier-General George Richards 

U. S. M. C. 

AT THE MEETING OF 

Tlie Sons of the Revolution 

IN THE STATE OF MARYLAND 



MARCH 15, 1918 



"The Royal Welsh Fusiliers" 




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Mr. President and Members oe the Sons oe the 
Revolution in the State oe Maryland: 
I wish to thank you one and all for the honor you 
bestow on the Sons of the Revolution in the District 
of Columbia, in whose behalf I am asked to say a 
word. Our Society is bound to yours by a tender 
tie. Our first President and founder was likewise 
your first President. I refer to John Lee Carroll, 
of Maryland, the great-grandson of the immortal 
Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Signer of the Dec- 
laration of Independence. Also, let me say, when 
the General Society, Sons of the Revolution, was 
brought forth, John Lee Carroll became the first 
General President of our national organization. 
Governor Carroll's attachment to our Society arose 
from the fact that our birth preceded your own and 
from the circumstance that his winter residence at 
the time was in the city of Washington. But when 
the Society of the Sons of the Revolution in the 
State of Maryland came into existence we promptly 
recognized his feelings, for we appreciated that he, 
as a native son of Maryland, belonged more prop- 
erly to your organization. We regretfully accepted 
his resignation that he might answer your unani- 
mous choice and serve you as President of the 
Society in Maryland, the State of which he was a 
native and a citizen. In his attachment to you, to 
us, and to the General Society as well, John Lee 
Carroll will be remembered always as a patriotic 
gentleman of high and lofty ideals to whom we shall 
forever pay a tribute of respect and affection. He 
was of ancient lineage, heroic name, assured station ; 
he truly exemplified the purpose for which our So- 
cieties were founded. He knew that we were not 
brought forth to dream of an heroic past, but to act 
in a crying present. The Sons of the Revolution is 
not a family living alone on the former greatness of 
its ancestors, without plan or strength for the future. 
We wear a button or badge that tells the world 



what manner of men we sprang from, but it should 
not be forgotten that we stand today for what they 
stood, for freedom, for love of country and of law, 
and for equal opportunity to all. Ours is the most 
fortunate of all generations of Americans; a most 
priceless privilege has been afforded us in these 
times. In this great cataclysm that convulses the 
world, men are groping for some immutable rock 
of refuge, for some rule of life that will save them 
and all that has been accumulated by their sweat 
since the Dark Ages. Where is that rock to be 
found? What is that immutable rule? Americans 
know in their hearts that the rock of refuge and 
that rule of salvation is Liberty. It is the one sure 
reliance, the one guide to life, safety and happiness. 
And when you ask Americans where the founda- 
tions of the Liberty we enjoy are to be found, a 
great majority will name the American Revolution, 
where our ancestors suffered, for we have been so 
taught in our youth that Lexington, Concord, and 
Bunker Hill were its beginnings. While such may 
be true in one sense, let us not be led into false con- 
ceptions in this respect. Far be it from me to inti- 
mate that that Revolution was not of priceless im- 
portance to us and to mankind. But what our 
fathers fought there for were not so much the 
rights of themselves and their posterity. More par- 
ticularly they struggled for the rights of other Eng- 
lishmen, and what inspired them and made them 
master builders were those ancient Anglo-Saxon 
rights that had been won for them on English 
soil by their own forefathers. In our Capital, the 
city of Washington, there rises a lofty, splendid and 
stately spire, erected to the memory of that pivotal 
figure of our Revolution, George Washington. It 
rests upon a tremendous and solid base, necessary to 
its stability. Deep down in the ground that base 
is founded. How deep, how solid, no one knows but 
its builders, for its massive foundations are never 



now seen by us. If we go down into the cellar of 
our political history and study there the sills and 
sleepers of freedom, the foundations of the well- 
rounded dwelling wherein is found the liberty we 
all enjoy today, there is much that we shall see. 
That liberty, that freedom, owes its origin to begin- 
nings of fifteen hundred years ago. All through 
the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages and in modern 
times down to the Abolition of Slavery, those rights 
have been held and added to by the English-speaking 
peoples. They came not as summer breezes; most 
of them came in storm and stress; for centuries 
Anglo-Saxon skies have resounded with combats for 
liberties. What our fathers of the Revolution did 
in this relation presents a new view, for they not 
only secured to us, their posterity, the imperishable 
blessings we enjoy today, but also they freed every 
English colony from the selfish colonial policy of 
the times of George, the Third. And their action 
inspired all other peoples of the civilized world to 
examine carefully into their own rights, and this 
examination caused a realization of wrongs that set 
the world ablaze, first in England itself, then in the 
French Revolution, and later in the European Con- 
tinental uprisings in 1848. Our American Revolu- 
tion in this respect became one of the major founda- 
tions of Liberty — America's noble contribution to 
the list. It brought forth first the Declaration of 
Independence, an immortal document which from 
its inception has been in essence a declaration of war 
on all kings, princes and potentates the world over. 
And out of that struggle there was further brought 
forth the best system of free representative govern- 
ment thus far the world has ever seen — a system 
that secures justice to all and protects all, high and 
low alike, from the encroachment of unlicensed 
power. But none the less, that Revolution was but 
a step, one phase of a great movement involving the 
destiny of the human race that had preceded it for 



centuries and continues to this very day. Along 
that great highway over which humanity has pro- 
gressed in this movement, there are many milestones^ 
that mark its progress. The signing of the Magna 
Charta at Runnymede iii 1215 was one; the Refor- 
mation in Europe in the sixteenth century was an- 
other; the coming here of the Pilgrim Fathers yet 
another. So was the French Revolution that fol- 
lowed our own Revolution; so, in the thought of 
many, was our own Civil War. And, as we look 
back at our development as Americans and at the 
same time glance at the paths over which other na- 
tions now our allies, have trod, there we see diverg- 
ing or intersecting roads with the obstacles created 
by one nation against the other, when our interests 
and our aims did not seem identical. Now all those 
paths have centered into one main highway. There 
we, the free peoples of the world, are standing to- 
gether, bound in the one great cause of today. That 
cause concerns not the destiny of ourselves as indi- 
viduals, nor of ourselves as nations or peoples; it is 
a cause that concerns the fate of humanity itself. 
For, as we have grown in strength and in might, as 
liberalism has spread to other peoples, so has the 
rule of despots, of emperors and kings grown 
weaker. Today government by inheritance and ab- 
solutism have centered in a few, in one, we might 
say, in the hands of the German Kaiser himself. 
Under his guidance it is engaged in its death strug- 
gle. This war is to determine whether that form 
of government conceived by our fathers and dedi- 
cated to personal liberty is inherently and funda- 
mentally strong enough to survive against its oppo- 
site form where the power rests not with the people 
but with their privileged few. So it is, that inci- 
dentally, and accidentally, we are now fighting for 
England, just as England is now fighting for us; 
but essentially and fundamentally, we, all of us, the 
English, French, Belgian, Italian, Japanese and 



American people, are fighting for ourselves and for 
civilization. The call of today is for men to conse- 
crate their talents, their energy, their lives, their 
fortunes and their sacred honor in the cause of hu- 
manity. We, the Sons of the Revolution, clearly 
see that that struggle of our fathers was essentially 
a part of the struggle of today. One of our fore- 
most public men, in reminding us that George, the 
Third, with his packed and corrupt Parliament and 
his equally corrupt Cabinet, headed by Lord North, 
did not represent the true spirit of the English peo- 
ple, either in those times or since, put the case thus : 
The American Revolution was but a revolt against a 
Teutonic King of England, led by an English gen- 
tleman, by name George Washington. 

Now, in the English Army there is a hallowed 
custom which gives to every regiment the right to 
inscribe on their colors the name of every battle 
in which they participate. Do you know that there 
is one regiment of British troops that fought against 
us from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, who refused to 
inscribe their American battles on their colors? 
They said, when that, as a battle honor, was offered 
them, that they did not wish to commemorate battles 
where they had fought Englishmen. And this regi- 
ment fought in the Irish Wars, and there is no rec- 
ord of such battles on their regimental banners. We 
of the Marine Corps know that regiment well. Dur- 
ing the Boxer uprising in China, in the summer of 
1900, we formed its acquaintance. It is known as 
the Twenty-third Foot, or the Royal Welsh Fusil- 
iers, and it was on an historic spot cherished by 
English-speaking peoples that our acquaintance was 
formed. At Taku, China, at the mouth of the Pei- 
ho River, more than fifty years before, Capt. Josiah 
Tattnall, of the American man-of-war Toeywan, 
came to the assistance of an English frigate, en- 
gaged with Chinese pirates, and uttered his mem- 
orable words, "Blood is thicker than water." There, 



on that very spot, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and 
the American Marines, early in that summer of 
1900, wrote these words into actual deeds. We en- 
gaged there in battle against one enemy, and for 
the first time in the history of the two nations Eng- 
lish blood and American blood was shed together. 
I was not with those forces at that time. But a few 
weeks later I arrived, and on the night of July 12, 
at Tientsin, I saw the Twenty-third Foot for the 
first time. In the darkness of that night we allies 
were assembled on Victoria Road in the British 
concession of Tientsin. We were to endeavor to 
take the Chinese City of Tientsin some 3 miles 
away, held by a formidable force of Chinese troops 
and Boxers. The Twenty-third Foot came up and 
were halted in our immediate presence. By and 
by, the word was given to advance. *'Royal — 
Welsh !" was their command, instead of "Forward — 
March!" Away went those khaki-clad British sol- 
diers into the darkness. When dawn came, there on 
the open plain to our left was revealed the deployed 
skirmish line of the Welsh with their khaki-covered 
helmets standing clear on the sky-line. But on the 
backs of the British officers we noted something 
black in the shape of a triangle. "A good idea," we 
thought, "the men will know their officers, but the 
enemy in front will see no difference." Later in 
the day, after we had advanced under fire with 
heavy losses and had reached a position under the 
Walled Forts of Tientsin, whence we could proceed 
no further, we were again joined by. the Twenty- 
third Foot. We had settled there more or less ex- 
hausted, but had "dug in" to stick. Some of us 
turned to Capt. Gwynne, who commanded the Brit- 
ish forces, and, noting then that that black triangle 
was of ribbons, we said we thought it a clever idea 
so to distinguish their officers to their men and not 
to the enemy's snipers. "Not so," said Gwynne. 
"It serves that purpose here, but such is not the 

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object. These ribbons are the *flash' preserved by 
us in memory of our service in America in your 
Revolutionary War." And then he told us the story 
of the flash. In those times they wore the periwig, 
with its pigtails or queue. After the surrender of 
Yorktown they were sent to Nova Scotia, where 
they learned, a year or more after its discontinuance, 
that the pigtail was no longer in fashion. As the 
last regiment to wear the queue, they took the rib- 
bons with which the periwig was tied and sewed 
them to the backs of the collars of their tunics, and 
wore them thereafter as part of their uniform. In 
1823, when some question arose as to their right 
to wear this as a distinctive feature of their uni- 
form, the circumstances became officially known, 
and an order came from the Crown, reading : "The 
King has been graciously pleased to approve the 
'flashes,' now worn by the officers of the Twenty- 
third Foot, or Royal Welsh Fusiliers, being hence- 
forth worn and established as a peculiarity whereby 
to mark the dress of that distinguished regiment." 
And we learned some further interesting informa- 
tion as to the Twenty-third, which served to endear 
us, as Marines, to them. The Hon. Sir William 
Howe, commander-in-chief of His Majesty's armies 
in America, after Gen. Gage, was designated to 
that high command from service as colonel of the 
Royal Welsh. He, as you know, made a failure of 
his mission. When relieved by Sir Henry Clinton, 
the famous Admiral Howe, his brother, came to 
American shores in command of the British fleet. 
Then the French had openly come to our help with 
a squadron stronger than that of Admiral Howe. 
The British ships were insufficiently manned. Howe 
had no marines, and he made his wants known. Out 
of compliment to their former colonel's brother, the 
Royal Welsh volunteered for this duty. In iso- 
lated fights, the most notable of which was that with 
the French Caesar, a seventy-two, by the British 



I sis, of fifty guns, the spirited and gallant behavior 
of the Royal Welsh as marines was noted in the 
official reports. And let me tell you here something 
of more recent history. When our Gen. Pershing 
first set foot on British soil on June 10, 1917, from 
the gangplank of the steamer Baltic, the military 
bands greeted him as our most distinguished soldier 
with but one air, that to which the national hymns 
"America" and *'God Save the King" are set. And 
there was a guard of honor of British soldiers, who 
presented arms to him at this instant. It was com- 
posed of a detachment from the Royal Welsh, the 
Twenty-third Foot, the comrades of the United 
States Marine Corps of 1900. During its two hun- 
dred years of existence the Royal Welsh have been 
the recipient of many honors. The Prince of Wales' 
Feathers, the Red Dragon, and the Rising Sun are 
the badges of the Prince of Wales. They were 
given the Twenty-third for its services in the Marl- 
borough campaigns, when George, the First, in 1714, 
conferred on them the title "The Prince of Wales' 
Own Regiment of Welsh Fusiliers." To commem- 
orate this distinction, it advances to the command of 
"Royal — Welsh!" instead of to our "Forward — 
March!" And the White Horse of Hanover, the 
badge of George, the Second, was granted to the 
Royal Welsh after the battle of Dettingen (1743), 
where the King personally witnessed the regiment's 
gallantry. The Sphinx was awarded them after the 
Egyptian campaign in 1801, where the regiment car- 
ried a high, disputed sand hill at the landing. Its 
battle honors begin with Namur (1695), on what 
is now Belgian soil, and include such names as Blen- 
heim, Oudenarde, Egypt, Martinique, Corunna, Sal- 
amanca, Peninsula, Waterloo, Inkerman, Sebastopol, 
Lucknow, Burma, Peking, and Ladysmith. No 
regiment which, during by far the larger part of its 
history, has consisted of a single battalion, has a 
list of "battle honors" as long as that of the Twenty- 

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third Foot. When Gwynne told us that they had 
fought at Bunker Hill, we, asked him what hap- 
pened to them. ''Well, you jolly well shot us up 
'there," he said. "Some sort of an order was given 
to your people to wait until we got to the top of the 
hill." "Yes,'' we said, "every American schoolboy 
knows that order, 'Wait until you see the whites 
of their eyes.' " "Well," said Gwynne, "it cost us 
eight hundred men out of twelve hundred, that day, 
so our regimental history says. But that, as history, 
is over. It is worth noting that these days are 
proud days for us; for the first time in the history 
of the two nations we, the regular forces of each, 
are acting together against a common enemy." So, 
there with the American dead and British dead 
about us, we became real friends, to remain so for- 
ever, each thereafter praising the other in official 
reports to their respective governments. Now the 
Twenty-third Foot is an old organization; with 
twenty-five other foot regiments, they were called 
into being in 1689, created by William of Orange, 
one of the most liberal of monarchs on the English 
throne, to take part in a struggle against the well- 
organized attempts of a mighty Bourbon military 
autocrat to force his will upon other freer but less 
disciplined nations of Europe. And history is now 
repeating itself; the Royal Welsh is again engaged 
in a like struggle with the greatest military autocrat 
of all times, in the cause to which we Americans are 
also consecrated, where they are once again shoul- 
der to shoulder with the United States Marines. 

At the beginning of the great war of today the 
home battalions of the Royal Welsh were assembled 
at Wrexham Depot for service in France. On 
French soil they fought and bled in the stress of 
those times. When the German advance was hurled 
back from the Marne, and modern trench warfare 
was initiated on the Aisne, after months of the 
fiercest fighting, there occurred an incident — a mo- 

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ment of relaxation, if it may be so called — that 
many of us read of at the time. On Christmas Eve 
of 1914, on a sector manned respectively on oppo- 
site sides by the Saxons and the British, the firing 
suddenly ceased, but not by orders. The Saxons 
shouted out first, "Don't shoot." The British lads 
held up their hands in assent. A barrel of beer 
came over the trenches from the Saxon side, and 
the British in turn gave over their surplus rations. 
These British troops who responded to this invita- 
tion were none other than the famous Twenty- 
third, the old associates in China of the United 
States Marines. Let us remember that Christmas 
Eve of 1914 and those Saxons, our enemies now. 
The carol chorus that arose from the German 
trenches that night came from hearts that for the 
time being expressed peace on earth and good will 
to mankind. Their ways are not our ways now, 
though their strain is in the Anglo-Saxon stock, but 
their song silenced for the time the crack of the 
sniper's rifle leveled across no man's land. 

*'You English there, why won't you come out," 
the Saxons called, and then the candles burned along 
parapets that were before guarded with ceaseless 
vigilance. A British chaplain gave to a Saxon colonel 
a copy of the English soldier's prayer, and in return 
received a cigar with a message for the bereaved 
family of a certain wounded British officer who had 
recently died a prisoner of war in German hands. 
And on the following Christmas Day the Saxons 
and the Welsh buried their dead and even played to- 
gether a game of football, where the Saxons won. 
That such things could have occurred in the midst 
of war seems unbelievable to us, but that they did 
occur there can be no mistake. It brings us back 
our faith in the virtues of men. That truce was not 
an official truce, for no Kaiser willed or authorized 
it. It came from the hearts of those who were 
bearing the brunt of war; it expressed that senti- 

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ment upon which in the end the world will once 
again be united. And, as we remember what came 
from the hearts of Saxons, chained unknowingly to 
them to the wheels of the Prussian military desp>ot- 
ism it is our duty to destroy, let us also hearken 
back to what it was my endeavor to make clear in 
the beginning. Let us again go down and examine 
the cellar of our political history and study there 
anew the sills and sleepers upon which our insti- 
tuted form of government, dedicated to personal 
liberty, rests. There we find certain fundamental 
rights inherent with that system, such as the right 
of public assembly, the right of petition, the right 
of protest and the right of free speech. But first of 
all we find there the right of public assembly. We, 
the English-speaking peoples, had a word "moot," 
a noun, meaning ordinarily a dispute, a debate, a 
discussion, but its original preferred definition was 
"a meeting,'* a formal assembly. It is a word of 
Anglo-Saxon origin. Those ancient Saxons, the 
forebears of the very men who declared that un- 
official truce that Christmas night, carried what we 
may now call the beginnings of representative gov- 
ernment out of the forests of Germany into Eng- 
land. They had what was known as the folkmoot, 
the hundredmoot, the villagemoot, and the shire- 
moot, assemblies of the people for the discussion of 
matters that concerned them — the people. Puny 
and imperfect but well defined, these moots — the 
seed of representative government — found lodg- 
ment on English soil. There it was nourished and 
has grown into the institutions we cherish and fight 
for today. For from these moots of the ancient 
Saxons there have grown, under our guidance, 
parliaments, congresses, legislatures and constitu- 
tions, and governments expressive of the public will, 
while in the Germany from whence the seed came, 
liberty is dumb. 

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Why did such corne to pass? To understand, let 
us read these words of the German Emperor, ut- 
tered very early in his reign : 

"It is the soldier and the army, not parliamentary 
majorities and votes, that have welded the German 
Empire together. My confidence rests upon the 
army." 

And again, in 1898, he said : 

"The most important heritage which my noble 
grandfather and father left me is the army, and I 
received it with pride and joy. To it I addressed 
the first decree when I mounted the throne. * * * 
And leaning upon it, trusting our old guard, I took 
up my heavy charge, knowing well that the army 
was the main support of my country, the main sup- 
port of the Prussian throne, to which the decision of 
God has called me." 

Von Bernhardi, in his book, "Germany and the 
Next War," thus expressed the German aims : 

"Our next war will be fought for the highest in- 
terests of our country and of mankind. This will 
invest it with importance in the world's history. 
'World power or downfall!' will be our rallying 
cry." 

We are in this war to give expression by our 
deeds to the purpose of Almighty God. He has 
said: "He who would live by the sword shall die 
by the sword.'' So it is that every American who 
now crosses the Atlantic goes on a holy errand, and 
every gun, every shell, every bullet aimed at the 
heart of the enemy is engaged on a sacred work for 
the relief of humanity. America's cause is as just 
as Truth, as holy as a Benediction from the Al- 
mighty. In this ordeal, the cause of human liberty 
must either be advanced, or crushed. The w^orld is 
to become either all the one thing, or all the other — 
all slave or all free. 

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The New World is to carry forward this war for 
humanity from now on, and hereafter, so long as 
brute force attempts to control mankind. The 
clouds across the Atlantic are dark, indeed, in these 
times. But what of the radiance which shines from 
Heaven upon the free New World! Here is the 
hope of humanity. The Old World is inextricably 
engulfed in misery. It cannot do more than stagger 
along in bloody trenches, unable to make that suc- 
cessful war essential for an enduring peace. So, 
far aw^ay across the Atlantic, civilization stands 
stretching out its arms to us for help against the 
common enemy. So in answer to that call, in the 
name of Jesus Christ, we are going forward to 
victor}^ God, give us loyalty, God, give us forti- 
tude, God, give us unflinching and unfaihng cour- 
age to fight our country's cause and to fight glo- 
riously alike for Him. 



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